Readers who followed our Boilerplate symposium or who are otherwise fans of Peggy Radin's work will be interested to know that she has not rested on her laurels since the publication of Boilerplate. She has some scholarship forthcoming, and you can get a sneak preview over at SSRN.

This chapter develops an analytical framework that could help legal analysts – especially common law judges – make better decisions about boilerplate in the context of rights deletions deployed by firms against consumers. It is based on one aspect of the author’s recent work, Boilerplate: The Fine Print, Vanishing Rights, and the Rule of Law (Princeton University Press, 2012). A great deal of mass-market boilerplate – such as hidden lists of terms that recipients have no idea exist – should not be treated as contractual, and should be regulated by other means. But when courts insist on treating boilerplate as contractual, I encourage them to consider an improved analysis. That analysis takes into account three factors: (1) the nature of the right of recipients deleted by the boilerplate; (2) the quality of consent to the boilerplate deletion; and (3) the extent of social dissemination of the deletion. Two particular features of current doctrine should be improved. The procedural/substantive requirement in unconscionability doctrine is misapplied when a judge ignores the nature of the right once she concludes that the quality of consent is adequate, because some rights are market-inalienable, or partially market-inalienable. Market-inalienable rights tend to be rights that are constitutive of civil society, that are not salient to individual decision-makers, and/or that are important for the progress or well-being of the collective as a whole. Also, the notion of reasonable expectation should be avoided because it engenders a truly mischievous positive/normative ambiguity, and seems to license a conclusion that the more something is imposed on people, no matter what it is, the more it is permissible. The approach taken here need not be interpreted as innovative, because it can be understood as a reinvigoration of principles of equity that have been corrupted.

In today’s US, transactions between firms and consumers (including businesses in the position of consumers) routinely contain fine-print terms deleting rights to legal remedies against the firm, such as exculpatory clauses, waivers of consequential damages, and mandatory pre-dispute arbitration clauses. This chapter argues that such remedial rights should not be treated as mere default rules routinely waivable by recipients of fine-print contracts (‘boilerplate’), because such rights deletions threaten the rule of law by undermining rights structures that are central to the state’s obligations toward the public. When remedial rights are subject to easy waiver by boilerplate, they place recipients into a situation that might be called quasi-anarchy; that is, a one-sided situation resembling the anarchy that the state is supposed to supplant. Moreover, they underwrite a scheme of privatization that amounts to exercise of arbitrary power over recipients; and they transgress the principle of equality before the law by separating people that retain legal rights from people that do not. Such rights should remain situated in the public realm, and subject to a species of market-inalienability. This chapter thus argues for a modified version of the public/private distinction, related to maintaining the rule of law.